


Slip Slidin' Away

by wonderwanda



Category: The Good Wife (TV)
Genre: F/M, Ficlet, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-16
Updated: 2014-08-16
Packaged: 2018-02-13 09:09:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2145078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wonderwanda/pseuds/wonderwanda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She would always be his Pretty Girl.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Slip Slidin' Away

**Author's Note:**

> This doesn't have a beta, and is a late prompt fill for sweetjamielee's [Everything Changes ficathon](http://sweetjamielee.livejournal.com/106698.html).
> 
> The prompt was: Alicia, from someone else's perspective, using these lyrics ("Slip Slidin' Away" by Paul Simon) 
> 
> And, I know a woman / became a wife / these are the very words she uses to describe her life / she said, “a good day ain’t got no rain” / she said, “a bad day’s when I lie in bed and think of things that might have been." 
> 
> (It also bears mentioning that I'm aware that 'chalanced' is not a word.)

i. and, I know a woman 

She sat three rows away from him in some dumb class that neither of them cared about. It wasn’t as though they were at a liberal arts college, and everything was just presented to a person so they could soak up knowledge. They had to sit through classes about penal code, and five-thousand different types of tortes (which all had to be remembered forever).

Unlike him, however, she was poised and eloquent. He liked to rile up professors for fun, and they all seemed disappointed that he had the smarts to back up his absurd inquiries. The mark of a future successful lawyer, for sure. 

This particular class was an in depth study of the inception and implementation of the constitution through the repeal of prohibition. Pretty Girl, as he called her, caused him to get a B+ first quarter which was his lowest grade ever. (This isn’t to say he didn’t fuck around in a lot of classes, he just managed to always pull it together before finals.) 

Pretty Girl was also pretty smart he soon realized. He was never going to woo her with a B+, so he strategized. Every time she opened her mouth (which followed the Rosa quote effortlessly: _keep silent unless what you have to say is greater than silence_ ) he had to add an addendum or a question or play devil’s advocate or something else equally superfluous. Unlike her comments, Will’s were more of an exercise in masturbation. Well they would be, he surmised, until he learned her name. 

He started getting into arguments with Pretty Girl on a fairly regular basis, which she hated. 

“What’s your name?” He asked one day, after a particularly heated debate on societal morality towards Jim Crowe laws in the early 20th Century. 

“Jesus Christ, there are barely fifteen people in our class and you don’t know what my name is?” 

_I’m distracted by your effervescence._ (He didn’t say that.) Not that he didn’t want to, his brain was just unable to put it together. The knots in his stomach disguised by bravado covered up these words. 

Four or five months later they’re in his bed and he is ecstatic.

ii. became a wife

He’d kind of known this was coming. His Pretty Girl was becoming someone else’s. Her letters’ frequency went from often, to rare, to never. She spoke fondly of her new beau, and he lied aptly about his.

He filled his letters with deluded imagination of what the two of them would be doing together. Her code name was Phoebe Gates (like Pretty Girl) because although he was smart, he wasn’t too clever. 

He would come to develop this skill before they met again, and as she announced her engagement, he also figured it would be a good time to announce that he and PG had broken up. Will didn’t have pictures to send either. PG was private, he said; and even he realized how stupid that sounded. 

He played down how drowned he was in women. Everyone seemed after him for one reason or another which he couldn’t understand. He was flattered, but he was also busy. 

He absolutely would have made time for Phoebe Gates--er, her. Alicia. He just hadn’t had the opportunity. 

iii. these are the very words she uses to describe her life

Suddenly, after years of only passing thoughts, Pretty Girl was in his office. _Does he maybe want to hire her?_ Times are tough, she said. He was aware of her situation, as was the rest of Chicago. It was touchy. The Partners didn’t want her, but he fought. He fought with the same insistence that made all of their professors furious; and soon they relented. 

She was in his office. 

“How are you? How’ve you been?” He asked, tripping over the words’ regurgitation in his head. _That was stupid._

“Better. Things have been better.” There was a lot she didn’t want to tell him: the bruises on her knees had faded and it was becoming more and more comfortable to lean over the toilet, for one. Anxiety had eaten the majority of her year, but she was happy that he seemed well. She didn’t want to tell him that she’d stooped so low as to play Joni Mitchell’s _Blue_ album alone in her room. The addendum to that being, all the movies she’d watched were wrong and after the final note of ‘The Last Time I Saw Richard’ Alicia did not in fact, feel any better. 

“How about you?” She replied, not sure what to expect. 

“Busy. Really fucking busy.” There was a lot he didn’t want to tell her either. His brain was so full of work related cacophonies that he couldn’t even remember what his secrets were in the first place. He tapped his finger on the desk, trying to deflate the room’s awkwardness before opening his mouth again. He wanted to have a deeper conversation with her, but didn’t want to pry. “You’re doing alright?” 

“Yeah,” she breathed, “I’m fine.

iv. she said, “a good day ain’t got no rain” 

She put on her pretending to be married face. A disingenuous perma-smile, and barrage of “no comments”. She remembered the rhyme about pageant girl waves: _elbow, elbow, wrist, wrist, wipe a tear blow a kiss._

They were probably at some charity thing, but it amazed her that people cared about seeing her husband anywhere. Though it seemed backwards, she knew that more people would probably tweet about what she was wearing than ‘how dare Peter Florrick be allowed to breathe air on the same planet as the rest of us.' The sad thing was, sometimes she wished she could stick him in a spaceship and blast him up into the atmosphere too. Just so all of this would go away. Even if it was only for a moment. 

Her brain was elsewhere, as usual. She’d been coaxed into coming against her wishes so she could be the Ann Taylor mannequin beside her husband’s perpetual ribbon cutting ceremony. 

That was how the last six months of her life had felt. She was just a pawn in her husband’s dog and pony show. The late night hosts who’d mocked her husband relentlessly would never know what it felt like having him try and sleep in her bed again, and despite the insincere sympathy coming at her from all directions she wanted no part in her husband’s poor decision making. He’d brought his family into the situation without their consent. 

She reminded herself: _elbow, elbow, wrist, wrist, wipe a tear blow a kiss._

It wasn’t forever, but sometimes it felt like it.

v. she said, “a bad day’s when I lie in bed and think of things that might have been" 

They weren’t in bed _per say_ , but they’d covered themselves from prying neighbor’s eyes with their fancy duvet.

It started out as those things usually had, a couple of glasses of wine under the guise of a job well done. Or maybe a job they were well- _doing_. That’s how she rationalized it. She and Peter were ‘supposed’ to be together despite her desires clearly being elsewhere, right? That’s how these things worked? 

Will wasn’t thinking about any of this. He had his beloved Pretty Girl, and things were as they should be. He didn’t even have to persuade her. She was willingly in favor of his advances which stunned him. He was excited. Finally the woman he would _make_ time for was his. Not strictly, (which he pushed out of his mind) but for the time being none of that mattered. 

Every word of every love letter couldn’t hold a candle to how full he was. They knew any bravado he exuded in her presence was a put-on. He daydreamed about taking his coat off for her when it was raining, he thought about growing old with her and told himself he wouldn’t convince her to dye her hair when it turned grey. He pictured reading glasses on her face while they both read the WSJ and New Yorker (respectively) together on an old leather couch. 

Now she was on top of him and he was ecstatic. He took every care to make sure she was comfortable before they fucked, doing his best to match her rhythm roll by roll. 

For awhile he wasn’t sure if he was doing anything right. He tried his best to feign nonchalance, but he chalanced. He chalanced _a lot._

She didn’t have the heart to tell him she’d known the truth about Phoebe Gates the entire time. (One of their mutual friends was a horrible secret keeper.) She didn’t have the heart to tell him she’d stopped writing to forgo the temptation to see him again. She didn’t have the words however, to tell him that the things he wrote about the two of them were some of the kindest expressions she’d ever received. 

It pained her, and she finally spoke: 

_This is the happiest I’ve ever been._


End file.
